Robert M. Christie Views the Future as if Facts Matter.

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Ethics, Law and Bulimic Bombast as Con

The Empty Clown Suit who became a Fake President, short of a majority by 2.8+ million votes because of the elitist Electoral College, is amazingly transparent in his routinely bombastic behavior. Narcissistic sociopaths seek both power and adulation, yet are indifferent to the effects of their behavior on others. Thus, for him the idea of self-pardon is not outside his realm of Fake Reason.

The Fake President’s current gambit is classic Trumpery. Yes, it is a sad comment on the fragile American political culture to see his displays of ignorant arrogance unrestrained by propriety or circumstance. Yet it is also a teachable moment in the American political process as well as the source of a high-risk trajectory that could bring on a constitutional crisis. The response of the Congress to blatant assertion of monarch-like power over established processes of the justice system could lead to tyranny or to liberty. That, of course, depends on the tolerance level of the Republicans, and of the rest of us.

Seeking Totalitarian Rule

Can a sitting president “pardon” himself? The absurdity of such a recursive idea would be hilarious if it were not a tragic travesty by a would-be totalitarian dictator modeled on the behavior of his political idols, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. He truly aspires to be “above the law.” The only legal principle on which such an act could “justify” itself is the long dead illusion of the “Devine Right of Kings,” in opposition to which the American republic was founded.

Ultimately, only a “Manchurian President” could assert the “right” to pardon himself. Do you remember the movie, “The Manchurian Candidate”? The characters and their power sources may be different, but the metaphor is appropriate. In the present instance, the “Manchurians” are the American, Russian, and international oligarchs who, like the Fake President, have already reaped great financial gain from his corrupt actions in office. The immoral and criminal behavior goes back as far as his early personal corruption in business and his life-long ethical void.

The Fake President acts in the interests of the international criminal power structure – consider, for example, the Panama papers – to the detriment of the people of the U.S. and the world. The exercise of such power can continue only if left unchecked by the institutions the U.S. founding fathers established in order to maintain a balance of power among executive, legislative and judiciary branches of government. Left unchecked, it will surely lead to outright tyranny. (See Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny, 2017, which offers twenty lessions on how citizens can counter such tendencies.)

Democracy Under Siege

The framers of the Constitution were acutely aware of the danger of excessive power in the hands of the executive; they had had it with the tyranny of King George. The American Revolution began in opposition to tyranny, but it was never quite completed. Tyranny is a constant threat and the people can only thwart it by constant vigilance and the continual assertion of democracy over money ruling politics. To the extent that the financial and corporate elites that benefit from presidential corruption have bought and paid for “our” representatives and senators, the reality of a plutocratic coup looms very large. Rebecca Solnit and others argue with lots of evidence that the coup has already happened.

Of course, we must remember that most of what we see and hear in relation to politics on TV and on social media takes on the melodramatic aura of “reality TV.” All historical context is lost to the machinations and rationalizations of pure power and violence. We must also recognize that the Fake President aims his tweeting mostly at generating a smokescreen sufficient to distract most of the public from the reality denied. That is also the role of Empty Clown Suit #2 – Giuliani, whose babbling he spews forth intending primarily to distract and confuse the public.

Trump uses the pardoning of a bizarre assortment of criminals to claim widespread injustice in an effort to de-legitimize the Department of Justice and therefore Robert Mueller, the special council it appointed to investigate the international criminal interference with U.S. elections with which the Fake President increasingly appears involved. That he even mentions a right to pardon himself speaks to that involvment.